Shhh wrote:

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steven wrote:

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Or maybe the LTA have found a way to encourage them to take the risk more often - I had an interesting chat with someone from the LTA about that as a result of a chance meeting at Wimbledon.

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 Are you able to share that chat Steven?  Sounds interesting.

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I can't see any harm if I talk in general terms and don't name the person - not that there was anything particularly controversial, I don't think, so this may be quite boring!

I was talking to someone at Wimbledon and the person sitting next to them turned out to be someone fairly high up at the LTA on the playing side, who on realising who I was, thanked me for doing the top 25 tables, etc, saying lots of them use them to keep track of the players! We then got chatting and he seemed interested in whether an outsider who follows progress as closely as I do had spotted any general trends that they might not have that might be worth them looking into. Of course, he might just have been trying to be nice, but he was asking the kind of questions only someone fully engaged in the conversation would ask. I got the impression (not for the first time with the LTA either) that they are happy to listen to people as long as they are not unremittingly negative, and I find that understandable enough - I'd be the same!

Regulars on here (those who don't switch off when they see yet another post from me anyway ) will be able to guess the kind of things I brought up - most of them probably obvious to the LTA too, though who knows - I made it very clear that I am well aware that I only see a small part of the story.

On the men's side, we talked about the mass of GB Futures and lack of GB Challengers and the effects this is having on the men's rankings. As with Leon when philwrig spoke to him, the person I spoke to explained the strategy behind this, which in itself is obvious and appears to be working very well at achieving its (albeit limited) aims.

I said that I understood this (though pointed out in passing that we can't assume the majority of GB Futures points will continue to go to Brits - as things stand, it might only take one or two up-and-coming stars to come over and win a string of Futures to drastically reduce the number of Brits in the top 500 or so) but that I thought something had to be done about the players getting stuck in the 250-500 range.

I said that I would find the lack of GB Challengers more acceptable (at least while we don't have enough players to take full advantage of them) if much more was done to incentivise mid-range players (by which I mean those who ought to be giving Challengers and ATP qualies a try) to go and play them overseas, e.g. by weighting incentives more heavily in favour of doing this and/or by increasing travel funding for those tournaments (not only for those on full contracts), so that we get more mid-range players 'doing an Alex Ward' and less ending up doing reasonably well in Futures for years but never breaking out for a sustained period and eventually retiring - the Josh Goodall scenario, to quote the most recent example, and that wasn't meant to be a dig at Josh.

Basically, then, I banged on about the stuff I usually do  and pulled in some of the comments others here have made in a similar vein (since they often put things better than I do) - I'd love to be able to claim that it had a magical effect and they have since put something new in place that explains why there are more Brits playing Challengers at the moment, but that would be completely delusional  - I think the current increase in the number of Brits playing Challengers is partly due to the Brits who don't mind clay having a go off their own bat instead of hanging around hoping for QWCs during the grass season (e.g. Alex, DanS) and partly due to a lot more hard court Challengers being available at the moment than there were earlier in the year.

Anyway, it was interesting to chat to someone who is directly involved in the kind of things we often talk about on here and I have been impressed by the way the LTA seem to see what we do as helpful rather than a threat. They should do, obviously, but if they were as paranoid as the media make them out to be, I think they would treat us with a lot more suspicion.

I've been told by a few people that the players really like all the stats too, which is good to hear. In reality, of course, there are probably some people (staff and players) at the LTA who value at least some of what we do (some of whom make this obvious by the way they interact on Twitter or, in Fitzy's case, on here) and other staff and players who think we are a sad bunch and/or wish we would shut up and go away  ... but it's good to know that there are at least some of each in the former camp, who realise we are doing our best to support them constructively. (even if they don't agree with us all the time, just like we don't agree with them all the time! )

There, I warned you it wouldn't be very exciting!

R1:  (1) Jamie Delgado & Frank Moser (GER) CR 167 vs Antoine Benneteau & Maxime Teixeira (FRA/FRA) CR 722
R1:  (WC) Roberto Ortega & Ricardo Villacorta (ESP/ESP) CR 1140 vs David Rice & Sean Thornley CR 376
R1:  (WC) Jorge Hernando & Rubén Hernando (ESP/ESP) UNR vs (2) Ken Skupski & Neal Skupski CR 312

Nice draw for the Skupski brothers, in fact for all the pairs!